The Synthesis of Yoga - Sri Aurobindo Ashram

284 The Yoga of Divine Works
an intense activity of the intuitivised mind and life-power or an
ascent into these ranges can bring a true but still incomplete light
easily exposed to mixture, a light which is spiritual in its source
though it does not always remain spiritual in its active character
when it comes down into the lower nature. But none of these
things is the supramental light, the supramental power; that can
only be seen and grasped when we have reached the summits of
mental being, entered into overmind and stand on the borders
of an upper, a greater hemisphere of spiritual existence. There
the ignorance, the inconscience, the original blank Nescience
slowly awaking towards a half-knowledge, which are the basis
of material Nature and which surround, penetrate and powerfully
limit all our powers of mind and life, cease altogether; for an
unmixed and unmodified Truth-consciousness is there the substance
of all the being, its pure spiritual texture. To imagine that
we have reached such a condition when we are still moving in
the dynamics of the Ignorance, though it may be an enlightened
or illumined Ignorance, is to lay ourselves open either to a disastrous
misleading or to an arrest of the evolution of the being.
For if it is some inferior state that we thus mistake for the supermind,
it lays us open to all the dangers we have seen to attend a
presumptuous egoistic haste in our demand for achievement. If
it is one of the higher states that we presume to be the highest,
we may, though we achieve much, yet fall short of the greater,
more perfect goal of our being; for we shall remain content with
an approximation and the supreme transformation will escape
us. Even the achievement of a complete inner liberation and a
high spiritual consciousness is not that supreme transformation;
for we may have that achievement, a status perfect in itself, in
essence, and still our dynamic parts may in their instrumentation
belong to an enlightened spiritualised mind and may be in
consequence, like all mind, defective even in its greater power
and knowledge, still subject to a partial or local obscuration or
a limitation by the original circumscribing nescience.
*
* *